Mickadeit: Councilman invites more scrutiny

Is Los Alamitos City Councilman Dean Groseagain in trouble because of something he opined about President Barack Obama?

Four years after Grose had to resign as mayor because he sent a black woman and others an image depicting the White House lawn as a watermelon patch, O.C.'s second-smallest city is buzzing again over another piece of Grose's primordial mind that he decided to share.

Commenting on the huge turnout for the recent Crossroads of the West gun show at the Orange County fairgrounds, Grose wrote on a fellow tea partyer's Facebook thread: "Uniting America against Obama's regieme (sic) one AK47 at a time!" Coming so soon after Sandy Hook, Grose's comment is seen by some as hugely insensitive.

Lon Wahlberg, publisher of the local News Enterprise, says he thinks the comment is actually "far worse" than the watermelon incident because it is both insensitive toward victims and families of mass shootings and racist in context of Grose's track record about Obama.

"This is a council member who suggested taking up arms against the administration," said Wahlberg, adding that the reaction to his coverage of the comment increased the paper's Web activity "2,000 percent."

Given my position on Grose after the watermelon email – that he's probably too stupid to be in public office – this may come as a shock: I don't think Grose was that far out of line this time.

I heard about what he posted soon after he posted it and I thought he simply meant that every time someone buys a high-capacity firearm, he is further diminishing the impact of whatever gun-control package Obama eventually signs. Typical of Obama-hating gun lovers. (Grose himself has said he was merely advocating for Second Amendment rights.) Anyway, I didn't write about it.

But now it has been the subject not only of the local paper but of a local blog, Let's Fix Los Al, so there seems to be some buzz around Grose stepping into it again. Los Alamitos Mayor Warren Kusomoto issued a statement saying that although he considers the post "a minor misstep," it "reflects negatively" on the city and he hopes Grose will knock it off.

"Sandy Hook hit real close to home," Los Alamitos political blogger Dave Emerson told me. "Don't kid about AK47s when kids my grandkids' age are dead because (the Sandy Hook shooter) had that kind of a gun. It was terribly insensitive to Facebook that."

Still, Emerson doesn't think it rises to the level of the watermelon episode.

For one thing, he said, Grose compounded that incident by never acknowledging that what he did was racist. In this case, Grose had the post removed within a matter of hours.